Language Log

Our new content-management software, WordPress 2.5, has generally been a pleasure to install, administer and use. But I have a complaint. The solution is probably covered somewhere on the helpful WordPress forums, but the problem is annoying enough to document here.

I have no idea why everyone here at Language Log Plaza is so pleased with the new hosting software and editing environment. <i>WYSIWYG</i> web editing indeed! &amp;quot;What You See Is What You Get&amp;quot; is neither what I want to see nor what I want to get. I have always entered my HTML code <b>by hand</b>, not with some fancy show-me editing product for wimps, all decorated with little icons and buttons to press; and I have done it <b>myself</b>. My cited data is properly placed in <i>in italics</i>, my indented quotes are in <blockquote>...</blockquote> environments, and when I want non-breaking spaces I simply insert non-breaking&nbsp;spaces. I intend to continue working as I always have. &quot;Progress&quot; is not always a good thing. In fact it is mostly a bad thing. And if the Language Log editorial staff want to try and cut me off for editorially incorrect formatting they will just find that the

Sometime early Sunday morning, the disk drive on the venerable Language Log server began having problems, and the process that hands out .html pages hung. I was able to repair the disk, as I have before, and things worked for a few hours, but then the same sorts of things began happening again, and fsck and I were unable to persuade the file system to return to normal.

Unfortunately, all this happened just as I was scheduled to leave for a conference — I'm now in Florida, and won't be back until Thursday. So I've taken the opportunity to do some things that I should have done long ago.